He is England’s greatest knight, the man who saved the life of Alfred the Great and an entire kingdom from a Viking invasion. But when he is called back into service to combat a plague of monstrous beasts known as abominations, he meets a fate worse than death and is condemned to a life of anguish, solitude, and remorse.

She is a fierce young warrior, raised among an elite order of knights. Driven by a dark secret from her past, she defies her controlling father and sets out on a dangerous quest to do what none before her ever have—hunt down and kill an abomination, alone.

I quite liked the concept of this one, it fits neatly into a part of history that we don’t have much information on, and in the context of the story, it’s not an implausible scenario.

It was a bit hard to get through the first half dozen chapters or so, there’s a lot of world building and information, and it’s not until it skips forward a few years that the story itself begins. I think that if a lot of the information in those first chapters was spread out a bit more during the latter half, it would have made for a stronger story.

I didn’t find the characters overly relatable, but they were well portrayed – quite a few aspects were clichéd or predictable around how they approached the world or interacted with each other. That said, I still wanted to see how everything panned out. I did really enjoy how the abominations were portrayed, they’re just the kind of thing someone in the Dark Ages would come up with.

Basically, if you can make it through the first third of the book, you’re in for a decent historic horror novel with some very interesting beasties running around.